by Pete Molina
***
Damon Harding broke the link with the FBI agent and sat back in his chair, with a grin on his face. The meeting had gone very well and Damon was sure that Agent Dawson would go along with his plan. Blaming Sam Storm for the murders had really helped to push Dawson over the edge. It wasn't true though, the report did indicate that most of the wiped backups had been Newbies, and that these Newbies hadn't been seen in some time.
Sam Storm was definitely up to something. According to Julia, who had given him the file on Sam Storm, he had a record of opposing restoration technology. This record of opposition made it much more feasible that the involuntarily dissolution of the restoration personnel was part of the Virus's strategy. Contrary to what most believed, Damon knew that the virus had not been stopped, but had self-terminated when it had finished performing its planned tasks.
Consequently, there was no virus to analyze, only the results. Even the cube that had brought the virus had been erased. It was perfect, they could never trace the murder of those three thousand to him. He had been willing to take the risk, and it had paid off handsomely. The shares of Second Chance, of course, would be given to the next of kin of the three thousand, but because there were so many of them, none would have any real voting power. Damon effectively controlled the majority of the shares. He had rehearsed his speech to Dawson, until he knew he had just the right amount of emotion displayed to lead the agent into believing that he felt anger at the deaths of his partners.
Sam Storm and Jeff Hughes, according to their files, had been a vocal advocates for the abolition of the restoration technology. It was naive of them to think that that would ever, could ever be done. When they were in their early twenties, they had stopped protesting and began to focus on other issues and studies. Damon wondered what had happened to change their minds. It was more likely that their minds had not been changed but that they simply decided their present actions were accomplishing nothing and there were other ways to work for their cause.
Storm had apparently then begun to study nanotechnology in earnest, earning his advanced degrees in short order and doing theoretical work at one of the technical universities in Denver. Five years later he had applied to the Lunar Nanotechnology Research Center where he had worked developing commercial applications. Then after a brilliant career designing new technology for space applications, he had decided that he was finished there, resigned, and returned to the Children's City of Denver to teach. The path that he had followed wasn't odd. Most Newbies and Primers tended to try a new career every few decades, usually in different fields. The thing that bothered Damon was that while working at the Lunar Nanotechnology Research Center, Sam had access to the unrestricted assemblers.
Nanotechnology had been first realized midway through the twenty first century, but it didn't progress nearly as rapidly as had been anticipated because the engineering and software problems to be solved were enormous. It had taken an effort that rivaled the Apollo Program to realize the assembler, the key to nanotechnology. There were also a number of safety and security issues involved in building the assembler. People were worried about the technology getting out of hand and destroying the world, or of super weapons that greatly exceeded the nuclear weapons threat of the previous centuries.
Second Chance had used one of the first assemblers to develop the restoration technology. Their major contribution had been to develop the software necessary to reconstruct a human brain according to a mapping made with very advance scanning technology based on Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRI.
Backup and restoration consisted of several phases. In the first phase the person to be backed up went to a center that had a scanner, a very detailed scan was made of the person's brain but not of the body itself. For the body a number of samples of DNA were taken, all this information was then encoded and compressed and then stored in the data vault of the Restoration Division, or a hard copy could be written to a holographic crystal.
In the event that the person was found legally deceased, whether through accident, homicide, dissolution, or for being missing for a period of two years with no contact, the persons backup could be restored. The restoration took place in two parts. First was the cloning of the body. The DNA samples from the backup were used to clone a new body which was grown at an accelerated rate to the person’s physical prime, a physical age of early twenties. This part of the process took several weeks.
When the cloning was complete and the body grown to full physical prime, a series of nanomedical devices were injected into the clone’s blood stream, powered by the same process that powers the organic mechanisms of the body. The devices would proceed past the blood brain barrier into the brain and there would receive instruction by wireless transmission from the outside on how to reconstruct the brain from the scan taken during the backup procedure.
The devices would then proceed to rearrange the brain at the atomic level to match the structure recorded from the scan. Once that was complete, the devices would flush themselves from the body and the body would be awakened. The brain of the restored person was so close to the original that the person couldn't tell the difference and legally assumed the identity of their original. The only identifier placed on the restored person was a version number added to the back of their name which denoted the age of the person when the backup had been made and a short genetic sequence appended to their own that recorded their version permanently.
In Sam Storm 6.7's case his backup had been made when Sam was six years and seven months old after he died in an accident. This technology had caused a social revolution exceeding all others and it was realized that dramatic steps would now have to be taken to ensure that overpopulation did not occur. It took decades but finally the child lottery was established; interested couples could enter the lottery, which was held every time a person voluntarily underwent permanent dissolution. Permanent dissolution occurred when person decided that they had had enough of life and obtained legal permission to remove all of their backups from the system with no restoration upon their death. This in effect maintained zero population growth. It also dropped the birth rate to a very low level.
For the general purpose nanotech assembler, however, it was perceived as such a threat that all existing assemblers were moved to the moon at great expense, and a lab established there to select applications for the technology which were safe and could be exported back to Earth. The assemblers were designed to able to replicate only in the lab; this was assured by a number of safeguards.
Damon knew that Sam Storm 6.7 was a brilliant nanoengineer, and he had had access to those general-purpose assemblers. That was what really scared Damon. Storm hadn't attacked the restoration personnel. He had really only removed himself and a number others from the data vault. He had Julia run an analysis on the skills of the people removed from the vault. Twenty percent had been Newbie engineers scientists, and software programmers that had been some of the best in their respective fields. Many of them had resigned to teach at the children's city in the last decade.
It was amazing that no one had noticed this before. If these people were working together towards some goal, there was no telling what they could do, especially with an assembler.
“Julia I want you to have the LNRC Security review their records and try to determine of any of the assemblers have been removed from the secure area,” Damon requested. Hopefully security could figure out if Storm had removed any of the assemblers.
I am sending the request now, Julia piped up in response.
The guest was the other point that had Damon worried. It sounded like someone outside their group had been helping them. Helped them how, he didn't know. But April first when they were supposed to rendezvous was enough time for a restoration to be initiated and completed. Damon had a sneaking feeling that the guest was Terra Gates. If that were true, then things might be worse then he had ever imagined. Terra's restoration was proceeding normally;
it was expected to be complete by March twenty-fourth.
What really got to Damon, was that whatever was going on had escaped detection. He was the most powerful person in the solar system and he didn't even know what was going on. He would have to make sure that he had a reliable source of information about the activities of Jeff Hughes, Sam Storm 23.1 and Terra Gates while they were trying to find Storm 6.7. Agent Dawson was good, according to his record, but he wasn't someone that Damon would call a strong ally, and he wasn't likely to provide all the information that Damon would want. Damon needed something or someone better. What he needed was someone on the inside of the group. What he needed was a surveillance device that couldn't be detected, and he knew just how to get one.
Damon owned the company that had developed the neural implant companions technology. The companion couldn't be broken into or altered from the outside, but if while it was being installed certain changes were made, the companion could be made into the perfect surveillance device. The companion saw what the host saw, remembered what the host needed remembered, and had access to the data sphere.
If a small autonomous program could be added to the companion that would monitor the hosts every move and access any information the host had stored, it would be the perfect informant. And even better, the companion software wouldn't even realize what was going on. Damon initiated a call to his people at NeurTech who could get the job done, quietly. They would have two weeks before they needed the program because it would take that long for that outdated version of Sam Storm to reach the stage where the implant could be installed.